For an elegiac work, Hervelino has little in the way of lamentation or solace. “Death was there, there was no theorizing it or solving it.”
Though Kivland resolved not to speak about herself, the pages are dotted with first-person asides in brackets: dreams, flashes of memory, brooding.
A Poetics of the Press – ed. Kyle Schlesinger
What emerges is the ideal of a nonconformist, nonhierarchical approach to publishing, spontaneous and attentive to immediate social concerns.
In the circumscribed orbit of the main characters, everyone is innately good, no one does anyone harm (violence is the preserve of faceless technology such as drones), and action is largely subordinate to a harmony of attractions.